Word: seem
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...people have a new interest in losing weight, and health centers like this one are growing." Doctors at the fitness center, one of six state-run clinics in Moscow, see 80 to 100 customers a day. Cost: $3.20 for an hour in the gym. Most of the customers seem pleased. "I've lost 20 lbs. and have 20 to go," says Russian-language teacher Tatiana Sarycheva, 28, as she slides up and down on a yellow abacus-like machine designed to massage away fat. Besides offering classes in exercise and diet planning, the clinic employs less conventional methods of weight...
...clients at the fitness clinics are predominantly female. Despite the difficulty of buying chic clothes, Soviet women are quite fashion conscious and seem more interested than men in keeping their figures. Moreover, most men prefer to exercise outdoors rather than in a fitness center...
...almost any other country, the sight of a few computers would hardly seem worth noting. But in a society predicated on the control of information -- and, perhaps more important, on centralized decision making -- the placing of information processors in the hands of factory managers, middle-level bureaucrats, educators, journalists and regional planners is very big news. "There's a struggle taking place over the control of information," says Loren Graham, a Soviet-science watcher at M.I.T. "The debate is whether to make personal computers available to the general public or to restrict access by price or institutional control...
...very fact that the button is available at all is a sign that those attitudes are beginning to change. The Soviets seem determined to make up for lost time. In the past year as never before, TV shows have been alluding unashamedly to sex and even offering occasional nudity, while films have had explicit sex scenes. Last December at an erotic-art exposition in Moscow, a woman was covered in whipped cream and men in the audience were invited to lick it off; the scene was later shown on late-night TV. The capital even boasts its first touch...
...decades and more as a medium of political expression -- obliquely during the Brezhnev years, sometimes rantingly during the current thaw -- the Soviet stage sees itself as needing to rediscover its true concern, the human soul. Audiences apparently agree. While theatergoers continue to clap for lines of topical invective, they seem to respond most strongly to intimate glimpses of lost love, betrayal by friends and alcoholic desperation, whether in Chekhov's Uncle Vanya at the Moscow Art Theater or in quasi-documentary scripts about prostitutes and gravediggers performed by the city's most impressive acting troupe, the Sovremennik (Contemporary) Theater. Says...